Luke Taylor, Constructing the Family: Marriage and Work in Nineteenth-Century English Law (review)

Labour / Le Travail
Issue 93 (2024)

Reviews / Comptes rendus

Luke Taylor, Constructing the Family: Marriage and Work in Nineteenth-Century English Law (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022)

The historiography on the family has made great strides since the 1960s when the idea of the family economy as a fundamental element of working-class life began to be taken seriously. Advances in the histories of women, gender, and children, increasingly based on a Marxist-feminist understanding of social reproduction, opened the way to new theoretical frameworks. Social construction approaches, initially thought to clash with and undermine materialist approaches, were eventually found to support them instead.

Legal historian Luke Taylor proposes to approach these interrelated subjects by focusing on “the ideational and ideological” structures of the law and legal thought to demonstrate how particular “intellectual and institutional moves and processes” were elemental in devising “the disaggregation of the legal household and the emergence of Family Law; and, in so doing, reveal[ed] the constructed, contingent nature of the legal family and its specialized domain of Family Law.” (17) The law was an active, involved agent in dividing family and work into “separate spheres” to suit both patriarchy and production. He stresses “the mutability of ideas and rules” on which this historical outcome depended, and, consequently, the understanding that “the family” is not a fixed entity but can be challenged and changed to better suit those who live, as their class, gender, race, and age have always required them to do, far below the power structures of law, government, and capitalist wealth.

Taylor’s work is effectively both an examination of much of the international historical literature in these subject areas and of the legal documents, publications, and case studies that constitute an impressive body of evidence. He capably synthesizes these materials while bringing forward some incisive new conceptualizations. Many of the legal sources, covering the “long 19th century” (beginning with 18th century industrial advances), have never been examined, at least not in such depth and detail. That he has immersed himself in critical reading of both the historical texts and the contemporary published literature is evident in how he uses them to consider the changing family in relation to industrialization, class formation, the making of a working class according to lines of gender, age and status, and new expectations of the state.

Taylor’s introduction lays out the concepts, theories, and sources that inform the study, providing a succinct overview of historiographical and multidisciplinary trends over time. What follows, in four comprehensive chapters, are analysis focussing on Women, Work, and the Domestic Sphere; Youth, Work, and the Paths of Apprenticeship; Legislating Marriage; The Public Importance of Marriage in English Common Law. The concluding chapter sums up each previous chapter and offers several suggestions for further discussion. He contends, for example, that the early 21st century legalization of same-sex unions, inaugural as it may seem, can also be seen “as part of a much longer effort on the part of the English state to reinforce the centrality of marriage in family life.” (352) Despite the long history of oppression and repression upheld by law, his closing argument is notably hopeful: “the legal regulation of family and work relationships is far from immutable – and …further change, if desired, is possible.” (359) There is also a truly encompassing bibliography of both primary and secondary materials; the former not only demonstrates the scope of Taylor’s original research but will also be of tremendous benefit for those searching for historical sources in related subjects.

Taylor has produced a necessary reference for all who work in the interrelated subject areas of family, class, work, gender, age relations, and the relations of an expanding modern state increasingly intent on regulating social reproduction by regulating families. He takes great care to integrate his original work in the legal texts and cases with the extant literature across a number of fields and disciplines. The detail regarding these new findings and the varying theoretical frameworks into which they fit is most impressive, though at times overwhelming, especially in its reiteration. If this means frequent re-reading to get a grasp of what the author is saying, there is no question that he is saying much of interest.

Cynthia Comacchio

Wilfrid Laurier University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.022.